Paolo Sammicheli's blog/

Il mio primo post seguendo la corrente che fuoriesce da Flickr

riflessioni in un caldissimo sabato pomeriggio

OK, this is a technical article, so i will write it in English, My apologies for errors.

Do you know Second Life? It's a great 3d world where you can create your avatar and live a great experience. As far i know, it's a great but slower experience. My Think-pad R32 with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn really don't have all the necessary to run it decently. My average frame per second it's around 10, but in a not so complex environment it fall to 2/3

So, I'm constantly dedicated to find a way to improve performance. This article on Second Life Wiki explain some tricks. It talk about Windows viewer, but many viewer settings are identically to Linux Alpha viewer. Memory/CPU details are not comparable with Linux:

• Rebooting your computer before starting SL can help get better performance.
• Close as many background programs as you can while running SL, especially P2P programs (Kazaa, Gnutella, Shareaza, etc)
• Defragment your hard drive occasionally.
• SL works optimally with 1 GB of RAM (that's 1024 MB). More is better, but the payoff is much less beyond 1GB.

Rebooting? No way. Defragment? What is it? . Close as many background programs as you can while running SL... mmm as you can!

While running SL, especially in full screen mode (not my case) you really don't need anything from Linux Desktop Environments.

In this article i will explain how to have a different Session on Kubuntu login (but it can work also with all GNU/Linux distributions also Gnome based).

Creating a Second Life Session on Login Manager

First of all i use KDM login manager. Look on Ubuntu's wiki to find out how to do the same in GDM login manager. Googling a little i found this article but there's a lot.

We need to create a new "session" entry. I will call it SL. Create a file called "SL.desktop" on /usr/share/xsessions/ like this:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=SL
Exec=/usr/bin/startSL.sh
Icon=
Type=Application

Now, what you need is to create the Second Life starter script, locate i.e. on /usr/bin/ and called startSL.sh

#!/bin/sh
# /etc/init.d/apache stop & <-- Insert some stop service if you like it.
# wait 2
kwin &
/usr/bin/konsole

It use kwin window manager, you can use what you prefer. Then i start a shell with konsole because i prefer to manage some crash backing in a console instead to login manager. If you don't want to type cd <second life dir> and ./secondlife every time you can substitute the last line with <secondlife path>/secondlife, i.e. /home/pippo/SecondLife/secondlife.

That's all, now in login window, on menu "session" you will found "SL" on the list. Next time you want to back to normal work select "KDE" entry.

I noticed a 1 or 2 FPS gain with this trick but i have 1GB RAM. Probably with 512MB you will benefit more.

Enjoy

destinazione: Barcellona (Spagna). Ci vediamo il 31 Luglio!

I'm leaving for vacation; destination Barcellona (Spain). See you 31 July!